The Donald Trump Score Card

Donald Trump’s America Can’t Fight Xi Jinping’s China
China hawks pinned too many hopes on a deeply flawed administration.
By James Palmer
November 22, 2019, 12:47 PM

Donald Trump’s America Can’t Fight Xi Jinping’s China

excerpt:

"As an individual, Trump has always been an unreliable peg for China hawks to hang their hopes on. He has absolutely zero interest in human rights and free speech. His own instincts are authoritarian, as he has repeatedly shown through his support for torture, pardons of war criminals, and attacks on the press. He is barely even able to pretend that he cares; he goes after China out of protectionist instincts, not political principle.

Trump’s worldview is also corrupt to the point of childishness. He cannot imagine deals made on equal terms; his is a world in which the dogs eat the dogs and every game is zero-sum. That makes him a terrible leader for the U.S. alliances in Asia, which depend on complicated mutual relationships. His pullout from the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a straightforward win for China. While the alliance with Japan is just about surviving Trumpian whim, South Korea is growing increasingly alarmed after the whining demands for a quintupling of South Korean costs in the alliance. It echoes Beijing’s own view of the world, in which international rules are a joke by the powerful and the strong will always eat up the weak."

 

Trump has shown himself to be a populist wind vane with no sincere interest in human rights. He has damaged them in the name of opportunistic self-interests to score points with his political groups (cutting off humanitarian aid to Central America to foster anti-immigration sentiment for his base in the U.S.; cutting aid to the Palestinians to promote Israeli interests promoted by his Jewish, minister-of-everything, son-in-law Kushner; cutting off healthcare funding overseas to those who don't satisfy U.S. anti-contraceptive groups).

For decades he has consitently shown his opportunistic, bullying behavior that feeds his bank accounts and insatiable vanity..

He emits a brief political belch as if he is concerned about people when he is in a crunch situation where the alternatives might embarrass him or spoil one of his financial deals, such as a veto-proof vote on a bill from Congress. He made vague, waffling, references that insinuated a veto but changed his mind in the end.

It always comes back to Trump's vanity, as exemplified by the remark he made about the president of China: "He's got a million soldiers standing outside of Hong Kong that aren't going in only because I asked him."

Trump tries to turn his scrawn into brawn by embracing a photoshopped image of his face on Sylvester Stallone's body to promote his fantasy that he alone saved the day.

 

Alright Flag, next time I cook pinto beans and corn bread I'll make the black ones on the side for you. We can even run down to the food bank together so we could score some free stuff. They always have onions!

 

I always put butter and salt and pepper on them

 

On sawdust?

 

I hope the republicans don't see us at the food bank. They might call us names, or. . . . Shoot us

 

Sounds like you are rich and never been homeless. Homeless People even steal ketchup from Burger King to put over sawdust!

 

I'm starting to get the sense that Mister T is turning Republican on us. He wants to eat white man's vittles!

 

Totally bigoted post.

 

Trump has now made over fifteen thousand false and misleading statements in less than three years.

 

Why do you say that? They were White Christians from Kentucky and wearing Trump MAGA Hats! What does that say? In a court of law that would be Prima Facia evidence!

 

This thread is too long. Start a new one please.

 

How Romantic

Which one of you is going to be Ennis, which one Jack?

 

Wasittoyuh? You aren't invited. You aren't even in America.

 

Judge to sentence former Trump aide Michael Flynn in January
Dan Mangan
CNBC
Published Mon, Dec 16 20193:05 PM ESTUpdated 11 min ago

excerpt:

"Michael Flynn, the Army general who briefly served as President Donald Trump’s first national security advisor, will be sentenced for lying to the FBI on Jan. 28, a judge said Monday.

The sentencing date was set after Judge Emmet Sullivan rejected Flynn’s repeated requests to compel prosecutors to turn over additional evidence in his criminal case, which Flynn had suggested could lead to a dismissal of the charge against him.

Sullivan said Flynn’s lawyers “failed to explain” how most of the information that had not already been turned over to them is relevant to the crime he admitted.

Flynn pleaded guilty Dec. 1, 2017 to lying to FBI agents about the nature of his discussions with Russia’s ambassador to the United States in the weeks before Trump was inaugurated in January of that same year."

 

Flynn is high on the list of potential people for Trump to eventually pardon. Trump has made numerous remarks embracing Flynn. He claims Flynn is a wonderful man and is being treated unfairly.

 

Giuliani has admitted that he wanted the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine out of the way because she was an obstacle to his shadow government approach of excavating dirt on Biden.

It is expected that ethical and experienced officials who conduct activities through the proper channels would be considered to be an impediment by people like Giuilani and Trump.



The Ukrainian Prosecutor Behind Trump’s Impeachment
How the efforts of Yuriy Lutsenko and Rudy Giuliani to smear Joe Biden led to a Presidential crisis.
By Adam Entous
The New Yorker
December 23, 2019 Issue

excerpt:

"In a long conversation with me this past November, Giuliani largely confirmed Lutsenko’s account of their relationship. He, too, saw Yovanovitch as an obstacle, hindering his attempt to dig up dirt against his client’s rival in advance of the 2020 election. “I believed that I needed Yovanovitch out of the way,” he said. “She was going to make the investigations difficult for everybody.” Giuliani compiled a dossier on the Bidens and Yovanovitch, which he sent to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and which was shared with the F.B.I. and with me. John Solomon, a journalist, had interviewed Lutsenko for the Washington-based publication The Hill. Giuliani promoted the project. “I said, ‘John, let’s make this as prominent as possible,’ ” Giuliani told me. “ ‘I’ll go on TV. You go on TV. You do columns.’ ”

Initially, Lutsenko and Giuliani seemed a perfect partnership; the meeting between them, Lutsenko told me, offered a “win-win” situation. But by May each man felt that he had been led on by the other. After Giuliani failed to arrange a meeting with Attorney General William Barr, who had succeeded Sessions, and Lutsenko failed to publicly announce a Ukrainian investigation into the Bidens, Trump made his fateful July 25th call to the new Ukrainian leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, to request that he announce a probe into the Bidens and the 2016 election. In September, the disclosure of Trump’s request by a whistle-blower led Nancy Pelosi, the House Speaker, to launch the impeachment inquiry. Three weeks later, F.B.I. agents arrested Parnas and Fruman, who face charges of conspiracy, making false statements, and falsification of records. The F.B.I. has now reportedly turned its attention to Giuliani."

 

They were wearing Trump MAGA Hats. MAGA stands for make America great again. So, ask yourself this: How does Trump make America great again? Isn't America great under that Black man Obama? The answer is obvious. To make America great again he wants to make America a White nation again, under control of White rich men.

 

USA TODAY Poll: Impeached or not, Trump leads his Democratic rivals for another term
Susan Page, William Cummings and Nicholas Wu, USA TODAY
Published 4:55 p.m. ET Dec. 16, 2019 | Updated 6:25 p.m. ET Dec. 16, 2019

excerpt:

"WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump, the first modern president to face impeachment during his first term in the White House, now leads his top Democratic rivals in his bid for a second, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll finds.

The national survey, taken as the House of Representatives planned an impeachment vote and the Senate a trial, showed Trump defeating former Vice President Joe Biden by 3 percentage points, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders by 5 points, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren by 8 points.

In hypothetical head-to-head contests, Trump also led South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg by 10 points and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg by 9.

Polls taken nearly a year before an election are hardly a reliable indicator about what the eventual outcome will be, especially when the other nominee hasn't been chosen. But the findings do indicate that impeachment hearings detailing what critics see as Trump's violations of the Constitution and his oath of office haven't undermined his core political support.

 

From Stormy Daniels to Ukraine, Giuliani somehow always ends up prosecuting Trump.


Giuliani may be making a stronger case against Trump than Biden
Philip Bump
The Washington Post
December 16, 2019

excerpt:

"Let’s assume for the sake of argument that President Trump’s motivation in asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden was not, in fact, generalized concern about corruption in that country. It’s a fair assumption to make, given that he never publicly expressed concern about corruption in Ukraine before September and only rarely mentioned corruption elsewhere (save within the Democratic Party). But should you be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on that point, I ask that you set it aside for a moment.

Lots of things suddenly click neatly into place. That would explain, then, why Trump asked Zelensky only and specifically about Biden and his son Hunter instead of corruption more broadly. It would explain, too, why, asked several days after the rough transcript of his call was made public what he hoped Zelensky would do, he said he wanted the Ukrainian president to “start a major investigation into the Bidens” — not that he wanted Zelensky to focus broadly on potential issues of corruption. Particularly since there’s no robust evidence that Biden or his son actually engaged in any corrupt activity.

By the time Trump made that request on July 25, his team within the administration had been agitating for Ukraine to launch an investigation for a month, using Zelensky’s desire for a meeting at the White House as leverage. His team outside the administration — centralized in his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani — had been on the case even longer, stretching back to late 2018. Despite sporadic efforts to distance himself from Giuliani’s efforts in particular, Trump’s embrace of Giuliani’s singular focus on Biden has been obvious for some time and has been reinforced regularly even as the president has faced impeachment by the House."